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Saturday, May 11, 2013

Review ~ Should've Known Better by Cassandra Carr

Sara Jenkins, a math geek and hockey fanatic, is thrilled when the NHL hires her as an advisor for the Buffalo Storm. She gets to marry her two loves in this perfect job.

Sebastian St. Amant is a young hockey player looking to make the jump from the minors to the big leagues. His lifelong dream is within reach, but he needs to convince the Storm's management and coaches he's ready.

When Sara and Sebastian meet, sparks immediately fly. Both want to succeed, but neither can ignore the growing attraction and a relationship is out of the question—Sara’s an influential staff member and Sebastian’s a player, not to mention over ten years her junior.

But the impossible becomes the necessary when they can no longer fight their attraction. As everything crashes around them, the strength of their relationship is tested. Will it weather the storm, or should they have known better?

I started out really wanting to like this book. It had a great description and I was really interested in the direction of the forbidden romance with a hockey angle. These days you can find a lot of books about rock stars, billionaires, and when you do find an athlete it’s typically baseball, from my experience. But I just couldn’t find myself getting into this book. Sarah Jenkins is a self-proclaimed math nerd that just landed her dream job as a competitive analysis consultant for the Storm, the local NHL team. Basically she uses math to analyze game tapes, practices, and the players in general to make them better. One of my biggest problems that I had with this book was I couldn’t connect to Sarah’s character. I feel like that threw me off completely because I like to feel like I can put myself into the main female protagonists shoes and Inncouldn’t do that.

Right of the bat before Sarah goes in for her first day and to meet her new bosses she literally runs right into Sebastian St. Amant a gorgeous hockey player from Canada. Immediately sparks fly but Sarah shakes that off because she has a meeting to get to. They run into each other later after her meeting and are formally introduced to each other and the sparks fly yet again. Sarah starts her job and finds out rather quickly that she needs to prove herself to the management and coaching staff. The NHL is the one that hired her and management finds her to be an unnecessary addition so she starts off finding things that can be approved upon and showing her worth to management.

Sarah spends 4 months fighting off her feelings for Sebastian since she doesn’t want to lose her job and believes that if she becomes involved with one of the athletes that that is precisely what will happen. This was probably the entire first half of the book and kind of got boring constantly reading the same thing over and over of Sebastian and Sarah flirting and then Sebastian would kiss her and she would turn him down. The attraction between Sarah and Sebastian is strong and eventually she gives in but only if they keep their relationship private. As one would guess this causes quite the turmoil in their relationship and it eventually comes out that they are together but only after Sebastian gets arrested and Sarah shows up at the police station where management is there and don’t understand why she is.

They temporarily take a break from their relationship as a result of the incidents leading up to Sebastian’s arrest. The Storm goes into the playoffs and the book kind of abruptly ends. I thought there was a lot of unnecessary stuff in this book and it definitely felt like it was a lot longer than it really was.

There was definitely potential for this to be a really good book but I just didn’t connect to it like I would have liked.

Warning: There is a memory brought up of rape as well as a different situation where one of the characters is given a date rape drug. If this makes you uncomfortable I would probably pass this one up.

Disclosure: This ebook was provided to BBMoreB free of charge by the Author for the sole purpose of an honest review. All thoughts, comments, and ratings are my own.